James R. Mirick sets the record straight on things he cares about

Litvinenko, Gaidar, and The New Terror

I call to your attention to the puzzling cases of Alexander Litvinendo and Yegor Gaidar: seemingly healthy one day, then devestatingly ill the next. Mr. Litvinenko did not survive his poisoning with polonium, while Mr Gaidar appears to have done so, at least for now. Both have been persistent critics of the Russian government, which seems ill-disposed to be criticized by anyone. Anywhere.

And it’s the “anywhere” that should give us pause. We might accept that the Russians may be willing to butcher their critics on Russian soil with impunity (witness the contract-style killing of journalist Anna Politkovskaya recently). But what should be rather more bothersome is the thought that the long arms of somebody’s squad of poisoner-assassins should reach into the West where we — and others — are supposed to be safe. Litvenenko was in London where he lives, and Gaidar was in Ireland at a conference. So this implies, unfortunately, that certain entities are now willing and have the technology to carry out these attacks against individuals on foreign soil.

The Russian government has of course has denied any responsibility for this business, but unfortunately the Brits, who are very good at detailed police work, have found traces of the polonium elsewhere on Litvinenko’s agenda the day he was stricken, and also on several airplanes that flew between London and Moscow. Note if you will, polonium is not your everyday stuff: it’s not a stable element, is extremely rare in nature (about 100 micrograms per metric ton of uranium ore), and has a half-life of 137 days. Its also highly alpha-radioactive: a gram of it generates 140 watts of power, so its intrinsically dangerous to handle. So unless you have the ability to extract polonium from tons and tons of uranium ore, you got your polonium by using a reactor or a cyclotron to bombard bismuth. I suspect the average terrorist-assassin just doesn’t have the resources to do this.

I fear that this is just another example of how our government, which is focused on traditional big-ticket military machines, and on preventing Mexican stoop-laborers from sneaking into the country, and on “combating terrorism in Iraq,” is failing to figure out how to deal with what are likely to be the real attack vectors against us and out allies. The Prez may have said, “bring ’em on” but he wasn’t — and isn’t — ready.

And of course, as our foreign policy continues to be dominated by Iraq’s continuing slide into utter chaos, we are diverted from noticing Russia’s seemingly inexorable slide back toward political collapse and imperial totalitarianism.